On the other hand, when a sizable population of middle-aged women become the pirates, maybe our elected officials will be less inclined to set the dogs on them. Could Pinterest be a watershed moment in the copyright wars?

YouTube was 90% third-party content when it started out, and companies had a MUCH larger incentive to sue. YT made out fine, so I wonder if those repercussions will affect Pinterest in any way.

Or am I missing something?

Pinterest's ToS state that you cannot pin material if you don't have copyright permission. Of course, this is probably a large percentage of what gets pinned.

We'd encourage you to read these changes in their entirety, but we thought there were a few changes worth noting.

Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.

We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse. We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements.

Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

We think these changes are important and we encourage you to review the new documents here. These terms will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012.

Pinterest is getting lots of criticism from press on specific issues and they are editing them.

* "pro-ana" (anorexia) pinboards containing "thinspo" (pictures and sayings to reinforce anorexia) were featured in a Jezebel post. Pinterest clamped down and said they won't tolerate self-harm. See:

http://jezebel.com/5893382/the-scary-weird-world-of-pinteres...

* You need copyright permission to post something to Pinterest but virtually nobody has permission, so they added better takedown methods. See:

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/22/149169388/pinterest-wades-in-m...

* Pinterest is adding private pinboards and an API.

Pinterest added the nopin meta tag but that's absolutely the wrong approach. The onus should not be upon the copyright owner to police violations (after the fact).

Also, while Pinterest may be a fast growing site, it's still just a startup and the hubristic assumption that the rest of the Net adopt it's nopin tag just does not make sense.

I would say Pinterest needs to start from a point of not violating copyright rather than try to brush it off onto their users and not providing stronger tools to prevent such events from happening.

https://github.com/tumblr/policy

(The counterargument of "don't use the service if you don't even agree with how the TOS is deployed" is technically agreeable but utterly impractical since "I am whimsical" clause in TOSs these days protects the vendor and not the user, and places 100% burden of trust on the user that the whimsical TOS will not arbitrarily screw you over later. Every vendor relies on the fact that there are so many other vendors out there, that some percent can eventually get a free ride on trust)

Suppose we provide the venue for congregation. How to ensure legal survivability?

  Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.

  We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.
 
  We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements. 

  Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

Is the idea to get big really quickly and deal with the legal issues at that time?